Deborah Levy’s Memoirs

These are the first two volumes of a planned “living memoir”. You feel in them the presence of Simone de Beauvoir. Both autobiographical projects go beyond the reconstruction of a life, and Deborah Levy does that strikingly, but these memoirs develop into an exploration of the ethics of human interdependence.

There is a dynamism in Levy’s writing that tempts me to sample her fiction, though in de Beauvoir’s case the memoirs are the best of her work. I am curious about how the highly literary autobiography and fiction spill into each other.